What seems likely to be the lone televised debate in Alberta’s election was held Thursday night. There is talk of another round, involving some subset of the four leaders who were invited to Thursday’s show, but there are no firm plans, and nothing obvious for anyone to gain. The pundit class’s instant reactions to the debate have been various shades of disappointment. None of the leaders made an obvious fatal error of the sort that the design of TV debates invites, as the late PC leader Jim Prentice did in 2015.

My rule, as a television viewer and past panel guest, is that “television is stupid and it makes you stupid.” You would expect me to advance the corollary that TV debates are worthless, but I must confess a tiny intellectual consistency issue. As little as I like the Japanese game-show design of TV debates, and the attention devoted to tiny revealing moments like Prentice muttering “math is difficult” at opposition leader Rachel Notley, I also believe that the exercise of intuition on the part of the voting public is valid. There were good reasons Albertans flinched, and the PCs nosedived in polls, when Prentice made his remark.

Prentice was a decent, highly intelligent person of solid political character. But his momentary display of overconfidence disclosed that he had not absorbed, hadn’t fully accepted, the critique of the Progressive Conservatives (RIP) that had been forming in the collective Alberta imagination. An intellectual proposition can be abandoned or refined or explained away, but a micro-blunder in debate can’t. When one happens, no single person gets to decide what it means. It becomes the property of a whole people, the way a new word arriving in their language does. Television makes you stupid, but maybe sometimes it makes you stupid in useful, revealing ways.

Television makes you stupid, but maybe sometimes it makes you stupid in useful, revealing ways

So, yes: the dreary press habit of looking for a “knockout blow” actually makes some sense. But the effect of the habit is that when we put a gang of party leaders on a stage, and they arrive well prepared, and they stay on message, and their squabbling actually reveals the important ideological tensions in the election, all the newspapermen and talking heads are bereft.

That’s more or less how it went on Thursday. Premier Notley, much less relaxed than in 2015, continued to depict herself as mother-protector of the social safety net. The UCP’s Jason Kenney, subjected to an astonishing ordeal on talk radio by Charles Adler the night before, was spared further sustained abuse about his education critic’s unfashionable evangelical rhetoric. He got plenty of chances to strike his favourite chord about the alleged, and allegedly failed, “Notley-Trudeau alliance.”

The down-ballot party leaders fulfilled their purpose, wooing the important “pox on both Kenney’s and Notley’s houses” vote. I say “important” rather than “large” intentionally. No one knows which of the Alberta Party and the Alberta Liberals have a future, if either does: they are playing a zero-sum game between them, within the larger election.

Kenney may still be in a position to turn out the United Conservative base at the election, and the strategic premise of the UCP is that this base is just too large to make losing possible. Remember that the two conservative Alberta parties, each led by former Conservative MPs, got about 774,000 votes between them in the 2015 Alberta election. Five months later Kenney’s federal Conservatives, fighting a losing war nationally, gathered 1.15 million votes in Alberta. (Within Calgary the analogous figures were 234,000 and 328,000.) The UCP isn’t just trying to “unite the Alberta right” — although simple addition alone might be enough to win — but to restore it to what they regard as its natural size.

The debate, however, highlighted the strange impotence from which the Kenney campaign suffers. His strongest political card is probably the disliked carbon tax, but he couldn’t entice the premier into a direct defence of it. She passed the buck to the blue-ribbon panel that designed the tax, as she always has. The pair did have a genuine exchange about corporate taxes, which Notley raised and which Kenney plans to reduce. Notley’s warning that the tax cut offered “nothing guaranteed in return” was pretty silly, since her hike failed to bring in extra revenue, but it might take a real dedicated green-eyeshade voter to notice.

The resulting overall impression is that the heart of the UCP campaign is Kenney’s fever-dream of holding a referendum on interprovincial equalization, and thus somehow changing the Canadian constitution unilaterally, much like Archimedes moving the Earth. In the debate, Liberal Leader David Khan heckled this throughout much of the 90 minutes, mentioning a ridicule-inviting number of times that he is a “constitutional lawyer.”

Khan may not have earned Liberal votes for this (oh, goodie, a lawyer to vote for), but there can be little doubt he is right on the constitutional point. Kenney’s and Notley’s diagnoses of Alberta’s economic problems are similar, and so, really, are their plans for the treasury. This might leave Kenney to be judged on his program of constitutional theatrics and on the intellectual qualities of his party’s candidates. Is this the ground a good general would have chosen?

Bill Buford spoke about moving to Lyon with his family for a year to write Dirt, and then staying five, about their lives now in New York, and the future ...

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